[airspirit]

Been a while .... For background, my father in law runs the computer systems for the USN in the NW region + Hawaii, and all of their servers run strictly on *nix platforms. The clients themselves are usually either windows based or are text terminals. As of yet, they haven't had a major breach into their security systems yet, and besides crap like power outages (why they don't have on-site power generation for this while they do for other things is beyond me) and hardware failure they rarely ever have downtime. What I'm hearing from Joe is that because the people already in his department can't handle a change in-house it will cost a ton to switch over ... which is stunningly obvious, because regardless of the platform you switch to if you don't have competent people onboard then you will have to bring in outside help. Don't pretend this is strictly a Linux issue, since you'd have this problem with any other server OS change as well.

As for the email question, I understand that there are more uses for email than strictly text messaging, though many of these "groupware" features are redundancies that can be handled in other ways. Many places are going to secure IM clients to take care of much of this type of work, or other multimedia messaging clients to take care of these needs, which IMHO is an outstanding option for a large and distributed client base.

Hey, I'm not knocking you for using MS ... if it works it works ... what I'm knocking is that you have the blinders on and won't look at the real reasons that you can't switch. Ford Motor Company is going through this same thing right now, having to bring in external experts to customise a Linux distro for use in server and workstation platforms (doing away with the MS products that are causing constant and massive scale shutdowns on mission critical systems ... it is a daily issue). Since all their current (inept ... omg do they suck, which is part of the downtime issue) tech weenies are strictly MS guys, they needed outside support for it. If their tech weenies were already familiar with multiple platforms, however (as they really should be), then that expense (you should see the salary they're offering ... holy sheeit) would be nil.

Just a thought. I'm not a fan of linux for the cost, politics, or anything else: I'm a fan because it works better than the alternative, in my experience.